Joel EngelhardtVoters’ choice of firefighter John Kemp could upset the status quo at Palm Beach Gardens City Hall.
A year ago, as Palm Beach Gardens awaited the voters’ verdict on plans to annex a huge swath of long-established neighborhoods, City Manager Ron Ferris blamed opposition to the plan on the Palm Beach County Firefighters Local 2928.
Next month, he will have a member of that union on his City Council.
Firefighter John Kemp drew 55 percent of the vote March 11 to defeat land planner Chuck Millar. Kemp lives in Rustic Lakes, making him the first council member residing west of the Beeline Highway when he takes over for the term-limited Carl Woods at the April 3 meeting.
Incumbent Marcie Tinsley won election to her final three-year term with 85 percent of the vote against newcomer Scott Gilow.
Voters may get an idea at the April meeting what the results will mean for Ferris, 78, the longest-serving city manager in the county.
The two remaining members, Tinsley and Bert Premuroso, while generally supportive, have exhibited subtle signs of independence but they lack the votes to go further.
The city manager since October 2000, Ferris has been the recipient of outstanding evaluations in recent years from all five council members and has the solid backing of three members — Chelsea Reed, Dana Middleton and Woods. His contract has no expiration date.
Kemp’s addition could change that.
“I’m looking forward to bringing the voice back to the people and more openness on the council,” Kemp said after his victory. “We need more transparency. We need more open communication during meetings.”
The public will get its first view of how the council will act after Kemp and Tinsley are sworn in. The first action is to decide whether Reed will have a fourth one-year term as the city’s ceremonial mayor.
Reed, a staunch Ferris supporter, has held the mayor’s post since 2022 and is entering her final year on the council because of term limits.
Last year, the Reed-Middleton-Woods bloc voted to make Middleton vice mayor, even though Tinsley had served on the council longer. Traditionally, the vice mayor is next in line to be mayor but the city charter empowers the council to elect a mayor without regard to who is vice mayor.
But Reed also endorsed Kemp’s rival, Millar (along with Tinsley), and posted her thoughts on how much better city firefighters are than county firefighters, even suggesting Kemp’s election could lead to the county trying to take over the city’s fire department.
Kemp rejected the notion and the county union viewed the piece — “Green Truck or Red Truck? Does it matter? Yes, it does!” — as insulting and even dangerous.
Reed took her blog down a few days after posting it on Jan. 24.
Such salvos can sour relations, said Mike O’Brien, a vice president with the International Association of Firefighters Local 2928, which represents county firefighters. He said the piece led to friction among the rank and file in the two departments, green for the city’s trucks and red for the county’s.
While the union has been unabashed in its support for Kemp, 47, a county firefighter for 27 years, it is wary of how the two sides may govern together.
“The way she ran the politics of this election was wrong,” O’Brien said. “To directly attack somebody who could be your peer and now is your peer … they’re going to have to try to figure out how to be amicable about this.”
Kemp said he made 6,000 calls to voters and spent a lot of the time dispelling the fire department takeover rumor.
“I’m all about green trucks and red trucks,” he said.
Last year, Ferris blamed the union’s financial support for drumming up opposition to his proposal to annex the homes of 8,300 residents on 1,300 acres east of Interstate 95. The area is served by Palm Beach County Fire Rescue but if annexed, would have fallen under the city’s fire department.
City firefighters recently had ousted Local 2928 and formed their own local.
The annexation failed, with 93 percent of the voters in a single area against it in the March 2024 election.
Ferris had no guarantee Millar, 66, would have been any less independent than Kemp. While both ran with no experience in elected office, Millar regularly worked with government officials, elected and non-elected, in his 40 years as an urban planner.
He also had the distinction of serving on city boards for the past 10 years, including a stint as chairperson of the Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board.
In a city that hadn’t had a contested election since 2021 and held no public candidate forums, he and Tinsley campaigned together. But Tinsley’s supporters didn’t show the same enthusiasm for Millar, who won just eight of 43 contested precincts, falling short by 531 votes out of 4,900 cast.
Millar also had endorsements from a former mayor, Democrat Eric Jablin, and the county’s former Republican Party chair, Sid Dinerstein.
But he couldn’t escape his past, particularly an ugly breakup in 2018 that led a woman he had been dating to file for a protective order, leaving a document trail in court files. After news of the incidents broke, the Palm Beach North Chamber of Commerce revoked its endorsement of Millar.
To counter allegations that he was not fit to serve, Millar’s campaign mailed letters to voters from Jablin and from Millar’s sister, attesting to his 13 years of sobriety after run-ins over the 2009 breakup with his wife and two DUI arrests, both with his child in the car.
Millar won by more than 100 votes each in precincts in BallenIsles and Frenchman’s Creek, two of the city’s largest gated communities. Those two precincts accounted for 15 percent of the votes cast.
But Kemp won 33 precincts, many by close margins. He won all four of the city’s westernmost precincts, whose voters cast ballots at the city’s Sandhill Crane golf course. He also won precincts in the city’s older core — voting at City Hall and Palm Beach Gardens High School — as well as at Mirasol and a precinct covering the southern half of PGA National.
